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Monday, February 6, 2012

There’s no denying it, that the older we get the more we complain. I don’t I’ve had a conversation with my grandparents or parents lately that doesn’t involve some aching knee joint, a change in the barometer, or how the weather is always better somewhere else.

We “youngins” sit back and laugh and promise to never get like them, and if we do, we have written permission from our bestest of friends or siblings to send us away on a ship, never to return. We laugh and joke, but deep down we’re honestly hoping to not turn into a whiny old person.

But the funny part is that we mothers are just as bad. (Before I get started here, if you are a mother who has never once been low on energy and never moaned and groaned about diapers or the drop off line, the rest of this article does not pertain to you or anyone else on your planet. Please don’t take offense.)

I, for one, am always telling the world how tired I am. Mostly it comes out in three words, “large coffee, please,” but at times it rears its evil head in a soliloquy of raving mad stories and pleas for a shred of sanity. For a job we all love this much and the vast majority of us asked for, we sure do whine a lot as mothers.

“I haven’t slept through the night in 12 years.”

“I haven’t eaten a warm meal since the millennium.”

“I’ve been wearing the same shirt for three days because I don’t have the energy to do laundry and/or change it.”

“Just once I’d like to see a movie that isn’t animated.”

“My behind has been completely reshaped to a flat pancake because of all of the time spent on a bleacher.”

“I could theoretically survive in my car for weeks.”

And so on and so forth, and we moms get together for “playdates” so our kids can fight and for just a few brief seconds we get to sit down on a park bench or in a church basement and unload our tiresome woes.

The following are actual stories of tired moms collected in the past week. I truly wish I was making these up, including the first story in which I was sending a business-type email and signed it “Love, Karrie” and couldn’t even muster up the energy to write an apology. It was 9:30 PM.

My dear cousin and mother of two recently put her food in the refrigerator to be warmed up, and then turned on the microwave. She reports that it took her at least a minute to figure out where her food had vanished.

A friend of mine says that on more than one occasion she has found the cereal in the refrigerator, which for me happens more than I’d like to admit. And yes, the milk is usually in the pantry. Or the freezer. Or one time, on the washing machine.

Another friend has tried vehemently to open her house with her car fob, clicking unlock unlock unlock and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working.

And the winner of them all, another friend recently brushed her teeth with cortisone cream.

These women are all very well educated people, tremendous parents of fantastic kids, and excellent whiny mothers. We all are, and we don’t do it to be frumps looking for attention, we simply want the world to know that our intelligence has been temporarily halted due to some maternal functions such as lack of sleep and the preparation of fourteen thousand salami sandwiches and by matching tiny socks and carpools and checking math homework and playdates and board games all of which we lose because we can’t even focus long enough to get through Candyland without cheating.

We may not be rubbing on the Ben Gay, but I think our motherhood complaints are well-deserved enough to declare a new official term for the tired mother syndrome: Mom-haustion.

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Karrie McAllister writes and mothers from Small Town, Ohio, where she is also in the running for having the most unrelated part time jobs. Her column, Dirt Don't Hurt, has appeared on numerous Web sites and newspapers since 2005, and this blog is how she keeps track of them all until she can publish another book. Contact her at KarrieMcAllister [at] aol.com